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More people travelling from First Great Western stations are being offered fast track parking, with the announcement that eight additional car parks are launching the RingGo service. From today, people parking at Bodmin, Bridgwater, Clifton Down, Falmouth Docks, Frome, Gloucester, Liskeard and Weston-super-Mare can pay using simply their mobile phone and a credit or debit card. These eight stations add to the existing 64 First Great Western stations managed by APCOA Parking (UK) Ltd (APCOA), which have offered RingGo since 2006. Take up of the service at these sites has been excellent, with many stations now seeing more people pay for parking with RingGo, than pay with cash. The main benefit of phone parking, especially for regular travellers, is that they no longer need to hoard lots of coins for their parking. Instead, customers simply call the number shown on signs in the car park, provide their vehicle and payment card details, state their location (using the four digit code displayed), and say how long they are going to stay. The innovative service uses voice recognition to ensure the time taken to collect registration details is as short as possible - normally just a couple of minutes. On subsequent calls, the service retrieves the data previously provided, by recognising the mobile phone number, and this typically shortens the time taken to pay for parking, to less than a minute. Voluntary feedback from users highlights the many benefits of the service. "RingGo saves hunting around for all the coins", says Oxford railway user, Edward Capp, "and in the recent rain we had, saves trudging to the machine through the puddles. It's a great convenience saver. Why can't all car parks be like these ones?" Graham Tidball, General Manager of APCOA, says of the latest roll out "RingGo has been operating at many of our stations for more than two years and we've been delighted with the take up. Customers obviously like the service and give us very positive feedback, so we're sure this latest set of implementations will be received just as well." |
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